“Havana Syndrome” has so far been shrouded in a controversial secret as a medical condition and reluctantly made available in the scientific discourses. In spite of the reluctance, global availability of technologies to conduct the violations reported by the US diplomats was never a hidden agenda for conspiracies. US and various NGO accounts illustrate the deployments of these high-tech tools in warfare and beyond, targeting both diplomats and civilians.
Intelligent design is the buzzword of creationists in the 2000s. It is what might be conceived as a version of superficial vis-à-vis scientific discourses. The mindsets that are superficially concerned in seeing and conceiving technologies fictionalize the machine with a messianic mix- mash. Science at the service of the machinery of religion, selecting the traditional notions of demons and spirits and matching with fuzzy notions of the good and the evil.
For the critique of the prescribed religious allusions and resemblances, the intelligent design debates borrow from the non-corporeal data for projecting fictional incorporations to data. It presumes possible mental forms of similitude, if not exactitude, that might yield a prescribed religious outcome.
These turn out to be allegories of the design theory, which I’d satirize as the “Pancake Theory”, which lacks the analysis that may be hypothesized scientifically, but pretends to be “objective” another messianic miscognition at best. The theoretical vice of the intelligent design mindsets must be renounced due to the cognizance question in these structures.
Allegory, for Fredric Jameson in Allegory and Ideology (2019), is initially “dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis, and the like… offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (ideologeme) are constructed.” Notion of ideologeme, for the design theories, is the particular unit of religion that has a “dual structure”: an “opinion” and an “articulation”.
Political psychologists could never disentangle that double structure. For sure, Jameson would accept the “synthesis of opposites” without reservation. What would his allegory say about the illogically extreme dialectics in the design theories? “Design” theories have macro and micro versions. Micro version concerns the allegory if the primitive human who stumbles upon a ticking watch may not understand its purpose, he may tell that it is not a rock or a vegetable and that it has been manufactured -possibly for a specific purpose. Religious interpretations of the machine’s integrated knowledge serve as the macro version for similar opinions. Fish have fins, and birds have wings because of adaptation and selection, not because they are “avian” according to the technological lexicon. Attributing agencies to the machine and data have a messianic and exorcist span where the original illusions’ forces remain unquestionable. Unlike Al, however, humans are sensitive and mortal, and cannot be saved in portable flash disks, stored in hard drives or kept in remote servers.
Reality is structured upon the function of the Network contrivances, which is not exterior to the ideologies with various symbolizing mechanisms to register, diagnose, detect, decode the patterns or patternize the individual data for desire and need in the culture predominated by consumption and economy-politics.
Humanists International’s worldwide survey of discrimination and persecution the Freedom of Thought Report, continuously ranks Turkey as having “systemic discrimination” where disbelief often leads to cultural alienation. In time, situations of discrimination that create and maintain atmospheres of cultural ills for freedom of belief and expression, lead to individual and cultural harm.
Stigmatization of disbelief is not solely an escalating Turkish issue. According to the American Atheists and the Freedom of Thought surveys from the 2020s, the hegemonic culture in the United States demonizes disbelief.
The right to have or not to have a religion is a basic human right. Ensuring disbelievers have the same and equal rights with all the citizens of the world – with or without a particular religious inclination – would require globalized legal and cultural structures.
Accepting and respecting all beliefs, including non-belief, is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Disbelief, i.e. atheist and non-religious inclination, is targeted for persecution in various nations, the most severe cases involving the death penalty. Discrimination in general is an issue of superstitions about evil, leading to a general mistreatment of disbelief, breeding anti-scientific notions about what it means to be human, more than a disbeliever.
Religious belief is one of the names attributed to the evolution of the human brain, human intercontextuality and co-activity in the human mind. The name “God”, like those of polytheistic deities, Shiva or Brahma and so forth, concern how these co-active regions of the human brain are communicating in everyday lives, where humans in history had to come up with pseudo-scientific theories.
Religious or irreligious, conservative or liberal? Science shows that the human brain does not activate different regions, but that the brain regions for religious beliefs are comparable with the regions for political beliefs in the brain.
Science is the unconstrained search of truth, the free exchange of ideas, and the thorough inspection of hypotheses and theories through empirical inspection. Scientific research must explore novel concepts, challenge established paradigms, and follow the evidence wherever these may lead, without fear of retribution or suppression for failing to conform to a particular religious or ideological orthodoxy.
In 2009, the cognitive neuroscience program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that, to the human mind, “God” seems to have the same effect as that of any other human. According to this study of religious and irreligious people, sentences like “God is by my side” and “God watches me” lit up the same areas of the brain that humans use to decipher the emotions, thoughts and intentions of other people.
Integrity of science is surely not without challenges. There is potential for bias, possibility of mistakes or misinterpretations, and influence of external factors like funding sources or political agendas. That’s why scientists at NIH continued research for two decades, equipping it to observe the obstacles and remain a steadfast, credible means of expanding the frontiers of knowledge.
Various forms of belief, including religious belief, may be modulated by a set of intermingled brain regions and cultural networks. The researchers look at the studies that use functional neuroimaging or electroencephalography to find religious belief-related brain regions and networks, and studies involving lesion mapping.
The continued research shows the fact that religions and ideologies aren’t scientifically different, and that economy-politics are involved in the process of beliefs. Karl Marx, like Sigmund Freud, did not have the cognitive scientific tools to observe the brain neurons when he made the allegory of “the opium of the masses”, “the unconscious human deeds,” and “false sense of consciousness” in the economy-politics of cultural evolution.
Sigmund Freud discussed this in his 1927 work, The Future of an Illusion. But Freud’s speculations of what was happening inside our brains would be less scientific, considering the technology to understand the neural activity was developed decades later.
Despite the rise of secularism and non-religious affiliations in a lot of countries, to be an open and vocal disbeliever means carrying a heavy social and even professional burden. Disbelievers are often viewed with suspicion, mistrust, and disdain, seen as immoral, untrustworthy, and lacking in ethics or values. This stigma stems from the deeply-rooted cultural and historical associations among religion, morality, and social cohesion – the notion that without belief in a higher power or divine authority, individuals will inherently lack a moral compass and the motivation to be good, upstanding citizens.
One policy in religious countries or countries where religion is culturally rooted in law even if there is no religious law or there is secular law, is that these laws are interpreted loosely even if there is no strictly written description on the paper. In Turkey, for instance, the religion is registered at birth in the ID system of the state through what the parents’ religions are presumed to be.
Traditional wisdom is a formerly common, habitual or traditional, predestined way of doing things, and one of the logical fallacies that “bags" the question. There are no more religion sections on the ID card in Turkey. There is, however, a religion section in the system, which is more concerning due to the invisibility issues. This is a logical dead-end, clinging to the past custom of religious choice and conceiving it as the ideal and the true way to make progress in the system, keeping a blind eye to the fact that cultural evolution turns the “traditionally wise” into even inappropriate or harmful.
Although, scientifically, no one is born with the mental capacity to choose a religion or to be a member of a religious community, the creationist presumption is that humans are born by the gift of Allah or God or even pagan deities, depending on the dominant religion in the communities. When official institutions and initiatives distort scientific discourses and facts at the service of religious and ideological causes, they weaken their own credits and that of the sciences.
In time, questions and issues emerge for the difference of the legal from the legitimate. What is delusive is to automatically register a religion at birth, and write it down to the official identity system. In the Turkish case, getting rid of the religious section in the ID altogether would be the way to avoid the dead-ends of these issues. The only option in the religion section is ironically “No Choice” that could also mean “Makes No Choice”. No country for fellow atheists since they need to make a choice and “No Choice” doesn’t sound secular, sounds more like “Homeless” or “Allahless”. All the choices are warious religions, though sects and cults are not included.
Concealing religious choice behind a veil of secular law is ironic. Another non-secular symptom of legal delusion, even in more democratic countries than Turkey, is to loosely interpret apostasy while strictly registering religion.
Weakening the secular laws and human rights weakens the equality and non-discrimination rights that forms a just civilization, stepping into institutionalized discrimination, where the right to express atheistic views or non-belief would lead to stigmatization. The fact that a procedure has a history of practice does not automatically make it justified, that something was done before is not a sufficient justification on its own.
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(last entry by Tolga Theo Yalur - 15/03/2025 at 18:29)